Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Three, section #1 (begin)
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part III
The Freedoms of the Net
(section 1)
On-line revolution and couch activism: between myth and reality
Occupy's media exposure and Anonymous' logistic and technical support
bring us back to considerations on the perspectives and practices of
(political) engagement, democracy and on-line organization. (Digital)
Social networks have become successful because of the opportunities to
make and maintain contacts they offer: potentially, their constituency
encompasses the whole world. However, it is not to the user to make a
choice about how to establish that contact with others, but it is her/his
service provider, who, by using his 'default power' decides as he pleases
on the functionalities and mode of operation of this shared environment.
(Now it turns out that) It is easier to engage on-line than to commit
oneself into an off-line ('real world') organization. For example, the
effort needed to create a Facebook group to collect funds for refugees of
this or that environmental or other catastrophe is of a totally different
order than the resources mobilization required to build up a sort-alike
initiative in an non-digital, off-line setting. Moreover, when it comes to
facing the brutal realities of non-virtual organizing - Byzantine
bureaucracies, group discussions going no-where, material hurdles, etc. -
the non-digital citizen feels fatally powerless, whereas his on-line
counterpart is imbued with a feeling of omnipotence that goes with being
'on the Net'. The main strength of couch activism is that it offers a
simulacrum of participation, going with a good whack of 'Like' and 'Share
this Link', while one can fume with indignation about all the world's
misery, well-protected behind screens allowing for this 'sharing
experience', all provided and run by other (commercial) parties 'for our
own good'.
The Western medias' enthusiasm for the 'Arab Spring', and, not long after,
for the Iranian Green Movement, springs forth from the techno-eagerness
and the Internet-centrist perspective we wrote about in the first part of
this book. But, even more deeply, it is the outcome of a blind faith in
information as the purveyor of truth. Activists, and, generally, the
citizens of Western democracies are so much reality-hungry that they have
become convinced that you only need to remove the screed of censorship to
let democracy blossom. (In this perspective) Freedom is therefore the
result of a proper use of appropriate technology, and Information shall
thus release the Holy Host of the democratic gospel: if the Chinese were
allowed to communicate freely, the Party hierarchs would be swept out just
like the Soviet Politbureau ones in 1989. One can bet on the fact that all
coming insurrections will be read through the (distorting) prism of
liberation tech. But we should remember Gil Scott Heron's words: "you will
not be able to stay home, brother. (...) Because the revolution will not
be televised" [1x].
The technological 'glaze' that covers everything these days turns into a
one-size-fits-all garment allowing for 'cut-and-paste' analysis of all
social contexts, however different. And foremost, it also produces
preventive solutions to all social problems. (In this view,) Class
oppression is the result of communicative misunderstandings, of inaccurate
information. This is precisely the discourse of the technocrats who
provide (Internet) acces and/or shape the communication tools, and who
furnish politicians with bespoke marketing strategies [2]. A freer society
demands an intensification of information's circulation by accelerating
transactions and bettering the networks' interconnectedness. Here again,
technology plays a reassuring role by convincing 'honest citizens in the
West' that their standpoints and attitudes are Okay. The emotional getting
closer, enabled and caused by being witness of repression, and that almost
in real time, translates into a generalized support of the cause of
liberty (of the people). However, the walls that must fall to achieve this
are not, at least most of them, technological fire-walls, but social,
political, and cultural obstacles of major proportion.
One can summarize the rebuttal (technological) progressive will most often
voice when confronted with the sort of radical critiques we have developed
in these pages: every tool can be put to use in a revolutionary way.
However, within the Facebook aquarium (the 'real' thing, not the book -
transl.) we are constantly bombarded by /stimuli/ of information. In this
downpour of information, political content gets hopelessly mixed up with
all other contents, and does not have an autonomous space to it self - and
never will. The relationship of one to many, the illusion of 'spreading
the news' at a mouse click should not blank out the white noise caused by
the ensuing perpetual chatter. The revolutionary event shall be forgotten,
buried in the eternal present of real time recording (of everyth
Re: paying users for their data
On 07/24/2014 17:51, Wolfie Christl wrote: > Maybe the other way round: If users would have been paid for > their data, business models driven by personal data would be less > attractive or would look different at least Hi Wolfie, you are right, paying individual users for their personal data doesn't work, one way or the other. The bottom line is, the data of a single person has very little exchange value, hence the need to aggregate such enormous amounts to extract some value out of it. But there is something else I found fascinating in these numbers. Facebook is a near global monopoly, it provides services to 1'300 million people. I'm not sure there is another company (except Google) that has such a reach and provides something of value to so many people. Yet, it is a relatively small company generating just a tiny bit more than two dollars of revenue per person. So, it's a small company, serving the entire world. One must assume that it has destroyed much more exchange value than it produced. But it does so, extremely profitably, with a profit margin of close to 30%. For a relatively small number of people, this shrinking of markets is profitable, but it's still a shrinking of markets. One the one hand, it's a good thing -- since markets, as they expand in reach, are shrinking. Profits require extreme scales and near monopolies, only then one can compensate for the shrinking of markets through expansion profitably. This process seems like snake eating its own tail. Yet, as long as we all depend on markets to for our daily survival, the prospects for most people are brutal. Given the harsh social cnsequences, this makes all the control aspects in these technologies (facebook & nsa) terrifying. Unless, we learn to live outside the markets as we know them which will require to redistribute wealth on massive scale.. Felix -- | http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: paying users for their data
Jul 23, 7:02 PM EDT Get paid for posts? Social networking's new twist SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Facebook and most other social networks are built on the premise that just about everything should be shared -except the money those posts produce. At least two services are trying to change that. Bubblews, a social network that came out of out of an extended test phase last week, pays users for posts that attract traffic and advertisers. Another company, Bonzo Me, has been doing something similar since early July. "I just feel like everyone on social networks has been taken advantage of for long enough," says Michael Nusbaum, a Morristown, New Jersey surgeon who created Bonzo Me. "Facebook has been making a ton of money, and the people providing the content aren't getting anything." Bonzo Me is paying its users up to 80 percent of its ad revenue for the most popular posts. Bubblews' compensation formula is more complex. It's based on the number of times that each post is clicked on or provokes some other kind of networking activity. To start, the payments are expected to translate into just a penny per view, comment or like. Bubblews plans to pay its users in $50 increments, meaning it could take a while for most users to qualify for their first paycheck unless they post material that that goes viral. "No one should come to our site in anticipation of being able to quit their day job," Bubblews CEO Arvind Dixit says. "But we are trying to be fair with our users. Social networks don't have to be places where you feel like you're being exploited." Bubblews is also trying to make its service worthwhile for users by encouraging deeper, thoughtful posts instead of musings about trifling subjects. To do that, it requires each post to span at least 400 characters, or roughly the opening two paragraphs of this story. Technology analyst Rob Enderle believes Bubblews, or something like it, eventually will catch on. "I don't think this free-content model is sustainable," Enderle says. "You can't sustain the quality of the product if you aren't paying people for the content that they are creating. And you can't pay your bills if all you are getting are `likes.'" Gerry Kelly of San Francisco has already earned nearly $100 from Bubblews since he began using a test version in January. His Bubblews feed serves as a journal about the lessons he has learned in life, as well as a forum for his clothing brand, Sonas Denim. Though Facebook is by far the largest social network, it has a history of irking users. People have complained when Facebook changed privacy settings in ways that exposed posts to a wider audience. They have criticized Facebook for circulating ads containing endorsements from users who didn't authorize the marketing messages. More recently, people were upset over a 2012 experiment in which Facebook manipulated the accounts of about 700,000 users to analyze how their moods were affected by the emotional tenor of the posts flowing through their pages. Facebook apologized. Kelly still regularly posts on his Facebook page to stay in touch with friends and family, but says he is more leery of the service. "They just take all your information and make all the money for s. themselve It's insane," Kelly say s. Despite the occasional uproar, Facebook Inc. has been thriving while feeding off the free content of its 1.3 billion users. The Menlo Park, California, company now has a market value of about $180 billion, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg ranks among the world's wealthiest people with a fortune of about $30 billion, based on the latest estimates from Forbes magazine. Advertisers, meanwhile, are pouring more money into social networks because that is where people are spending more time, particularly on smartphones. Facebook's share of the $140 billion worldwide market for digital ads this year is expected to climb to nearly 8 percent, or $11 billion, up from a market share of roughly 6 percent, or $7 billion last year, according to the research firm eMarketer. Although it still isn't profitable, short-messaging service Twitter is also becoming a bigger advertising magnet, thanks largely to its 255 million users who also provide a steady flow of free content. Twitter's digital ad revenue this year is expected to rise to $1.1 billion, nearly doubling from $600 million last year, according to eMarketer. Facebook and Twitter have become such important marketing tools that celebrities and other users with large social-media followings are being paid by advertisers to mention and promote products on their accounts. Bubblews wants to make money, too, but it also wants to ensure that everyone using it gets at least a small slice of the advertising pie. Dixit, 26, who started Bubblews with his college buddy Jason Zuccari, says the service got about 200,000 users during a "beta" test phase that began in September 2012. The service unveiled a redesigned website last week as it fi
Re: paying users for their data
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 24/07/14 02:29 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > > Now this is obviously the roughest of ballpark estimates you can > make -- and I would be happy to see a better one -- but on the face > of it, it seems to indicate that viewing one personal data as an > economic asset is really a lousy idea, "In as much as they constitute fixed capital, algorithms such as Google's Page Rank and Facebook's Edgerank appear 'as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude'.( Marx 1973: 694) and that is why calls for individual retributions to users for their 'free labor' are misplaced. It is clear that for Marx what needs to be compensated is not the individual work of the user, but the much larger powers of social cooperation thus unleashed and that this compensation implies a profound transformation of the grip that the social relation that we call the capitalist economy has on society." http://quaderni.sanprecario.info/2014/02/red-stack-attack-algorithms-capital-and-the-automation-of-the-common-di-tiziana-terranova/ > no matter how you slice it. If a person's personal data is economically valuable to the degree required for it to be anything more than a negligible source of passive income, the rest of their life(style) will be less workerish and more megastarish. If people want minimum wage for Tweeting then I want minimum wage plus benefits for reading their arguments. Facebook-workerism is creepy. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 Comment: Using GnuPG with Icedove - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJT0zxpAAoJECciMUAZd2dZ2qMH/ApHQTqV99A+g0M7hqZW8WoR 9ZSxlnFrRSbRSArtUm9r5izacZsxsOyhm2AE8eFg83l933ZPLiMB7tNOgU31cETs p913/CV0qLYBYfptaSFSbL7qYadDt9eSlljtSZRTWZw0MAXYaPAoxRZmo5RrxwY/ 6vjoVEVvivP9bZHRsQL0VrL8PtI1N2HV1PjhqqA33Jc1xQx2QIY8fU5kGJcHnpIN teC0Ps2L3xvNb+4bTbpc3rPpGGx1d7XUk/cTiw++4uLb2K2rtHTmA2ko9g0G0+/o LrEBRQ6cEBUeXoU6XZKBN4WwoVPebCSm9kyBRKmCeuGSg5TY/bmyordeLH2Byv8= =r8ML -END PGP SIGNATURE- # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
